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External hard drive recommendations, please

post #1 of 9
1/19/11 at 10:52am
Thread Starter 

So my computer has an internal drive of 500 gigabytes (note how I did not say gibibytes).

Not I need external storage right now, but one day, yes, with all the 24/96 uncompressed WAV recordings I'm taking.

I do have a small 250 gigabyte external USB 2.0 drive, drag-and-drop type. Today I went to a local major electronics store and most drives there has "supports PC and Mac", so basically "does not support Linux" is pretty heavily implied. Most of them comes with proprietary linking (backup and sinc) software so everyone is veering towards the closed Apple empire now (will not work without software is also quite implied)?

Anyway. My computer has an eSATA jack so basically we can take USB out of the picture. So I'm looking for eSATA hard drives, 7200RPM (15'000 if possible) and high cache is always preferred. What are good brands (and good places online) to purchase?

Thank you very much.

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post #2 of 9
1/19/11 at 11:18am

Funny you should mention that. Just yesterday I ordered a 2TB sata drive, enclosure and esata cable. Got a Samsung F4 online on sale for $79. It's 5400 rpm, which is fine for me, since I want reliability and transfer speed for my music library and backup. If it was for my o/s I would go higher access/rpm. Used to avoid Seagate and buy WD, but Sammy seems to make a pretty good drive lately.

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post #3 of 9
1/19/11 at 11:20am
Thread Starter 

I can get internal SATA drives for cheap, but where do I get eSATA enclosures and how do I assemble them?

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post #4 of 9
1/19/11 at 12:31pm

esata is just the connector.I got an enclosure with both esata and usb connectors so I could backup both my desktop (usb) and laptop (esata). I get my stuff from here. all you do is open the box, snap the drive to the connector in the enclosure and screw the drive in place. takes all of 5 minutes and a screwdriver.

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post #5 of 9
1/19/11 at 12:37pm
Thread Starter 

Alright, so let's say I buy a desktop-use internal SATA drive, would the connectors be somehow "standard", as in will fit in any enclosure of correct size?

And the eSATA is a cable linking the completed enclosure assembly to my computer, correct?

Thanks.

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post #6 of 9
1/19/11 at 12:47pm

you got it

and by the way, speed is the same through the esata cable as if it was plugged into the mobo

sweet

 

 

edit:as long as the enclosure says sata. they do make ide only enclosures for really old drives

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post #7 of 9
1/19/11 at 1:18pm
Thread Starter 

Yeah that's why I want eSATA in the first place. Speed. USB 3.0 is quite new, so.

Thanks for all the info.

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post #8 of 9
1/19/11 at 6:01pm

There is also a USB to eSata cable. So if you have a USB drive, you can connect it to your eSata.

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post #9 of 9
1/19/11 at 9:17pm

Here is my suggestion. If you decide to buy an external hard drive enclosure, then make sure that it can support both USB 2.0 and eSATA II at a minimum so that you have some flexibility with regard to making it compatible with GNU/Linux, Microsoft Windows, and Apple OS X. Make sure that you get an aluminum enclosure so that it is durable. The advantage of a hard drive enclosure is that it is portable, but you will not be able to use it for more than one drive at a time. I decided to buy a Thermaltake BlacX hard drive dock. It will work with either a 2.5" or 3.5" SATA II or SATA II hard drive and it has both USB 2.0 an an eSATA ports on the back. The advantage is that you can have an unlimited amount of storage capacity and you can use two hard drives simultaneously if you get a Thermaltake BlacX Duet hard drive dock.

 

As for hard drives, I trust the Western Digital brand exclusively for conventional hard drives. I would recommend that you purchase the Western Digital Caviar Black. Get a 2.00 TB hard drive with 64 MB of drive cache and a 7,200 RPM spindle if you plan to use the drive to boot your operating system. If you simply need storage capacity for media and data, then I would recommend that you purchase a Western Digital Caviar Green. These are energy efficient drives that have a spindle speed of no more than 6,000 RPMs and they have a maximum storage capacity of up to 3.00 TB.

 

Let us know what you decide to do.

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